50 Reasons to Love Liverpool

50 Reasons to Love Liverpool

With their team second in the Premier League table, level with the leaders on points and basking in the glow of a fine start to the season that not many people saw coming, this is a good time to be a Liverpool fan.

Reds' supporters have spent the international break longing for their team to return to action given the feel-good factor around Anfield at the moment, and perhaps they've been reflecting on just why they love their club so much.

Why do they support the Reds in the first place? What makes the club so special?

Jamie Carragher

A one-club man who was the envy of many others, Carragher was a talismanic force for the Reds for 16 years.

These days he has turned tough tackling into tough talking, and his current punditry work is admired by many who value the opinions of a man who won everything that was possible to win, bar the league title, with the Reds.

He was a special talent and who knows where the club would have been without him?

The Kop

When it is on song, the vast, swaying army of people can almost become one living, breathing entity, and it makes for a truly remarkable sight and experience the like of which isn't all too common in any sport.

Olympiakos 2004

At half-time against Olympiakos in December 2004, Liverpool supporters were pondering life in that season's Uefa Cup. It wasn't that difficult to imagine as they had been in that competition in the previous campaign.

The Reds needed to score three in the second period to stay in the Champions League. After understudy forwards Florent Sinama-Pongolle and Neil Mellor grabbed two of them, Steven Gerrard popped up to do the type of thing that Steven Gerrard has been doing for years.

Liverpool were still in the 2004/05 Champions League—and they had some pretty big plans for it.

The Merseyside Derby

The big book of football cliches probably has a chapter devoted to the Merseyside derby.

Whenever Liverpool and Everton meet, you always have to mention which derby it is (next month's will be the 278th), that passions will run high and tackles are going to fly in, but we like it like that, don't we?

The Reds against the Blues is a unique rivalry that you can probably never really understand unless you've lived in the area, but it is one of English football's best and healthiest conflicts—one which makes the game great, in fact.

The Fans

Liverpool now haven't played a Champions League game for four years, but that didn't stop almost 100,000 fans turning up to watch them when they played a friendly in Melbourne during the summer, and there were similar scenes and crowds in Jakarta and Bangkok.

Kevin Keegan

Think of the 1970s and it won't be long before Keegan's bouncy moptop comes to mind.

"Mighty Mouse" was a terrific player in an era when football superstars were beginning to come into their own, and the forward is perhaps responsible for a generation of Liverpool supporters actually following the club.

The White Suits

Nelson Mandela Is a Fan

The picture above shows the great Madiba himself donning a red shirt and meeting such luminaries as Neil Ruddock, Dominic Matteo and Don Hutchinson, who doesn't seem to know where he's supposed to be looking, as the Reds toured South Africa in 1994.

Pretty cool eh?

So Is Samuel L Jackson

The Hollywood megastar fell in love with the Reds when he was filming the 2001 movie The 51st State in Liverpool and has frequently spoken of his support for the club, even posing with a shirt as seen above.

He also took to Twitter to congratulate the Reds after the 1-0 win over Manchester United in September.

John W Henry on Twitter

Kicking out Hicks and Gillett

It was a long and exhaustive process, and only at Liverpool could it have been played out to such drama, but the Reds finally got rid of hated owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett in October 2010.

The pair were dragging the club towards financial oblivion, and the role that a committed group of fans played in their removal is certainly a source of pride and an example to many about just how to get things done—and gain some control of your club back.